Firebrand (26 page)

‘Leave her alone,’ I said, and then, because I’d sounded
unexpectedly ferocious, I added: ‘For now, right? The girl’s troubled. That’s all.’

Sionnach gave me a look that made me want to scratch my scalp. I growled at the roan, and it went into a smooth canter from a standing start, and we rode out of the dun gates as they swung wide for us.

I was looking forward to a hunt. It was a long time since I’d felt quite so much like killing something.

‘What are you frigging well laughing at?’ Eorna glowered up at me.

‘What?’

‘You can wipe that smile off your face, shortarse.’ At least he’d stopped calling me greenarse, and I wasn’t about to fall out with him over a name-calling, since—unlike Carraig—he was a friend and we liked one another. The liking was buried deep, it’s true, but it was there.

You wouldn’t think it to look at his furious face now. ‘Did I ever gloat at you?’ he roared.

Fair enough. I made myself stop grinning. Truthfully I hadn’t been aware I was wearing such a satisfied smirk till he’d mentioned it. Taking my blunt sword from his throat, I let him scramble to his feet.

The sky was a glassy blue dome above us and we were both dripping with sweat, but I was now beating him by six bouts to one and I’d wondered when he was going to explode. It didn’t help that the warmth of the sun had brought out a few spectators, some of whom had begun to cat-call Eorna. That was largely his own fault, since he’d trained a good few of them and they’d all felt the flat of his sword on their backsides and, if they were male, the whack of his staff between their legs. It wasn’t going to happen to me again.

Damn, I was good. I grinned again, couldn’t help it.

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ He jerked his head. ‘Is that why you’re showing off?’

I looked round. Sure enough Catriona was standing by the fence, watching, almost smiling. Of course, I’d known she was there. I’d just forgotten. Sort of. It wasn’t as if I cared. The smile left my face.

She’d got used to her change of image. Nobody pinched her rear-end, nobody wolf-whistled her, nobody mocked. Nobody flung her to the stable floor and raped her. So she’d at last stopped hurrying from shadow to shadow, staring at the ground, her cheeks vermilion and her hands clasped in front of her crotch. I grinned, remembering her discomfort, and found her looking at me again, the shy smile back in place. Yes: still shy, still skinny-racked, but she had a nice backside. Her legs could use some muscle, though. Realising I was staring at them, I spat and turned back to Eorna, bringing my sword to my face in salute and invitation.

‘Forget it.’ Brushing sand off his practice sword, he stomped off. ‘So frigging pleased with yourself,’ he muttered. ‘Smug little shit.’

The gathered knots of watchers dispersed, some of them taking no more notice of me, one or two shouting a compliment. Actually
smug little shit
was a compliment too, coming from Eorna. I was smiling again, and worse, I was looking straight at Catriona. Again.

‘Doesn’t Grian need you?’ I gave her my coolest glare.

She shrugged, then shook her head.

‘Threw you out?’

Glancing down at the disturbed sand of the arena, she kicked it with the heel of her boot.

I laughed, couldn’t help it. ‘Did my
brother
tell you
where to go?’

Her eyes met mine, slewed away, and she laughed her funny soundless laugh.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘Don’t take it personally. He wants you to rest, that’s all. It’s not that he doesn’t like having you around.’

Hesitantly she nodded.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘I’m serious. He likes you. He worries about you.’

She gave me a very direct smile that made me turn my gaze away towards the dun wall. I didn’t know what to say after that; I only wished she’d go away. I had things to do and friends to meet. I wanted to take the blue roan out onto the moor to meet Sionnach coming in, so I could tell him how I’d humiliated Eorna. He’d love it.

Puzzled, cross, ill at ease, I frowned at Catriona. Her serious gaze was turned on the sea horizon.

‘Want to go riding?’ I said.

* * *

Cloud shadows chased patches of golden light across the machair and the moor beyond. Catriona sat close behind me on the roan, alive with nerves, unable to cling to me too tightly because of the small leather bag I had slung across my back. I’d put a thin blanket on the roan, since the girl was used to a saddle, but it didn’t seem to make her any more comfortable.

I smiled. I liked her thin hands clutching each other around my waist, linked so tightly together her
knuckles were white. I felt her weight shift slightly as she leaned back and tilted her face to the sun. I was glad she was starting to enjoy herself, but for some bizarre reason I wanted her to lean against me.

‘Hey,’ I said.

Her scanty weight came forward again, the drag of her arms on my waist slackening. When I glanced over my shoulder her look was questioning, a little apprehensive, as if she was afraid she’d done something wrong.

Half-turning, I slipped an arm round her and pulled her off the roan’s back. As I swung her forward, her legs kicked wildly and the roan gave an angry snort. I heard her intake of scared breath, felt her fingers snatch at my arms, but before she had time to panic properly I had her astride the roan in front of me. I kept an arm round her waist, and one hand on the reins.

Through her ribs I could feel the hard beat of her heart. For a minute or more she was taut with fear, but when I said nothing, and did not move, her body relaxed a little. Her hands folded over mine, our fingers linking. At last she leaned her head back into the hollow of my shoulder.

I liked that. Her body fitted well against mine.

I thought I should say something but it didn’t seem too important at that moment. It wasn’t as if she could complain about anyone else’s silence. And not long after that, I realised she wouldn’t care if I spoke or not, because she was fast asleep in my arms.

* * *

I rode on because I wasn’t sure what else to do and I didn’t want to wake her. The fact that she was safe with us didn’t mean she’d be sleeping. I knew that fine, I knew it from my own nights. Conal was the only one of us who slept, and that was because his body would let him do little else. His screaming nightmares would come later.

I didn’t want to take the roan up to the high moor, to the Dubh Loch where his home was. That might be too much of a temptation, with a strange girl on his back, so I rode till I reached the still green pinewood at the Loch of the Cailleach. In the striped golden shadows the air was cooler, the filtered sun less fierce, and the loch glinted with diamonds between the trees. There was only the faintest stir in the air, barely even a breeze, and I let the roan come to a halt and strain his muscled neck towards the water. Tossing his head up and down, he struck the root-tangled earth with a hoof, danced his haunches sideways and gave a screeching whinny.

Catriona jerked awake, taking a high breath of fear. My arm tightened round her waist, and her fingers gripped my arm till it hurt.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, and then, to the horse, ‘A drink. That’s all.’

It gave its whickering laugh as I loosed the reins to let it pace forward and drop its muzzle to the clear brown loch. It drank, then raised its dripping muzzle, took a few splashing steps into the water.

~
Don’t even think about it
.

Innocently it whickered again, and pawed the water, a hollow wet echo of hoof on stones.

Catriona’s fingers loosened at last, so I squeezed my hands into fists to get the circulation back into my arms.

‘You’re strong,’ I said dryly. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe.’

I felt I had to keep telling her that.

‘Do you know what he is?’ I asked her.

She nodded her head, fast, frightened.

‘It’s all right,’ I said yet again. ‘But you have to get off first. Otherwise he’ll take you when I dismount.’

She let go of me, then, and I helped her swing her leg over the creature’s neck. It glanced back with a wicked look as that happened, but I took no notice. My hand tingled where it had touched her thigh, as if my circulation had stopped again. I shook myself, annoyed, and lowered her to the forest floor. Taking a step back, she watched me dismount, and then she watched the horse’s black malevolent eye.

‘Go on, my love,’ I told it as I pulled the blanket off its back and slipped the bridle over its ears. ‘Beat it.’

Tossing its black mane once more, it trotted off and merged swiftly into the tree shadows.

‘He’ll hunt,’ I said. ‘He’s hungry. You?’

She nodded, not frightened now, just eager. I put the horse’s blanket on a fallen pine trunk and we sat and shared the apples and the meat and oatcakes from the leather bag. She ate hungrily, almost violently, all her concentration on filling her stomach. Amused, I watched her. Her cheekbones seemed less hollow. The rack of her ribs had more flesh over it. There was more curve to her arse and her thighs, but she was never going to be what you’d call well-built.

Feeling my gaze, she hesitated and glanced at me. A
huge self-conscious grin spread across her face along with a flush of colour. She’s pretty, I thought. Pretty when she smiled.

The embarrassed smile stayed on her face as she sighed and threw her last apple core into the loch. It splashed in silver droplets that glittered in the sun, then bobbed on the surface. I scraped up some stones from the lochside and threw them at the apple core to see if I could hit it, and Catriona joined in. She was a rotten shot. I laughed and tried to teach her, but she stayed a rotten shot for a full quarter of an hour.

‘You’re crap at this,’ I said.

She nodded, put her face dramatically into her hands.

I prised her fingers away, one at a time and very gently. The mutilated nails looked better now: some had fallen away and they were regrowing. Playfully she snapped her fingers back into place as soon as I let them go and I laughed, but her eye, when I pulled aside a forefinger to reveal it, was gazing at me quite solemnly.

‘You’re good with horses though,’ I said. ‘And you bring out the decent human being in Grian.’ I hesitated, something catching in my throat. ‘You’re a dead good nurse for a clann Captain.’

Taking her hands away from her face entirely, she rested them on her knees, and smiled at the silver loch. She looked so happy I envied her.

I said, ‘I think you could get used to this place, couldn’t you? I think you could get used to us.’

Catriona tilted her head to look at me, and bit her lip, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘It’s not that I couldn’t speak,’ she told me, when I’d stopped being stupefied.

Her voice still sounded awkward. Uncertain, and a bit hoarse, and she kept sucking her lower lip into her mouth and biting it.

‘What was it, then?’

Her brow furrowed, as if she was trying hard to understand it herself. ‘Well. Maybe I couldn’t. But I knew I could if I…it was there if…if I had to.’

I said, ‘What a lot you know about us all.’

A flush stained her neck and her cheekbones. ‘It’s not that…I wasn’t…’

I threw another stone at the loch. ‘Isn’t it amazing what you’ll say to a mute.’

The hot dappled darkness and light of the forest seemed unnaturally still. As the sun moved, the loch’s sparkle had calmed, and now the water was a dark mirror, the sky above us solid with heat.

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I swear.’ She leaned down to pick out good round stones, selecting them very carefully, putting them into my hand like an offering. ‘If I know about you it’s not…it’s not because you spoke.’

I threw a pebble viciously at the bobbing apple core, making a direct hit.

‘It’s all so strange,’ she said. ‘You’re all so strange.’

‘Not us,’ I said bitterly. ‘You.’

‘See? That’s part of it. I’ve been afraid I’ll put my foot in it like that. Give some terrible offence. Make myself look a fool. And as soon as I speak, that’s what I do. I’m sorry.’

There was silence between us for long minutes. I thought she was sulking; it took me that long to realise I was the sulker. When I tuned in to her mood again I realised she was scared.

‘Don’t,’ I said, annoyed with myself. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t send you away, for gods’ sake.’

She gave me a grateful look. ‘It was easier not speaking. I had some peace.’

She passed me another stone, a good flat one. Drawing back my hand, I skimmed it across the loch surface.

‘I could think it over,’ she said. ‘You know? Think about what happened.’

‘Think it over, and over, and over?’ I said. ‘That’s not good.’

‘No.’ She contradicted me for the first time; I was surprised and pleased. ‘It
was
good. I had to think about what he did. I had to go over and over it until I believed it.’

I remembered. ‘Your stepfather?’

‘My mother’s husband.’

‘Why did he denounce you? What did you do?’

‘Do?’ Bitterness tinged her regained voice. ‘It’s what I wouldn’t do. After my mother died. Do you see?’

Astonishing, the power of the bolt of rage that went through my guts. For an instant I couldn’t breathe.

‘I see,’ I said. My fingers were trembling as I touched her lips. They weren’t so pale any more, the ride and
the fresh air had coloured her face with life. Yes, she was pretty.
That pretty girl from Balchattan
.

I let my finger drift to the corner of her mouth, and as her lips parted I felt rather than heard her small intake of breath. I kissed her.

For seconds her mouth was soft, and she was answering my kiss, and then her hands came up and pushed me away.

We stared at one another. Her throat convulsed as she swallowed, and she bit her lip hard again. Resentment coursed through me.

‘Seth, I…’

‘Please don’t bother to explain,’ I said icily. ‘You’re in love with my brother. It happens.’ In a savage undertone I added, ‘A lot.’

She stood up so fast she almost fell. I’d never imagined my unwanted protector could look so utterly furious, not with my enemies but with me.